A friendly voice we long to hear is coming back to us from interstellar space, 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away.
Voyager 1 — the farthest man-made object from Earth — is sounding like itself again on the deep space radio network after half a year of spewing nonsense.
NASA scientists are elated.
“We’re back, baby!” reads X post from NASA on June 15.
“Our Voyager 1 spacecraft is performing normal science operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – which study plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles – are returning usable science data.”
We’re back baby!
Our Voyager 1 spacecraft is conducting normal science operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – which study plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles – are returning usable science data.https://t.co/3FGBOANXGl pic.twitter.com/QqgsCmup7D
— NASA (@NASA) June 14, 2024
It’s the first time in many months that the 46-year-old probe has been able to share everything it’s been exploring in the near-freezing frontier zones of our solar system, beyond the influence of our sun.
In November 2023, Voyager 1 suddenly began sending back random readings that made no sense to scientists.
The problem appeared to stem from a small, damaged chip in the probe’s on-board memory, possibly caused by old age or perhaps triggered by energetic particles in interstellar space.
Because the technology on board Voyager 1 is so outdated, NASA engineers had to consult manuals from the 1970s to try to work around the problem.
On May 19, the NASA team was able to get two of Voyager 1’s four science instruments to return readable data back to Earth.
“Kind of like when your power goes out and you have to go around your whole house to reset all your electronics… That’s basically what my team and I are doing now,” an official account for X’s Voyager 1 explained.
Now, all four science instruments aboard the deep space probe can once again return usable data to our planet.
Kind of like when your power goes out and you have to go around your whole house to reset all your electronics… That’s basically what my team and I do now. – V1 https://t.co/DlWMZMtYaG
— NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) May 22, 2024
Voyager 1 and its companion, Voyager 2, are exploring a region of space that has never before been directly encountered by a man-made object, so missing any data is a major disappointment.
These probes are the only way scientists can directly study the interstellar medium, and their measurements have already revealed important details about how our Solar System is shaped and how far the Sun’s “solar bubble” extends.
Although the Voyager spacecraft are often said to have “left our Solar System,” they have only just exited the heliopause and have yet to reach the hypothetical Oort cloud, thought to be the outermost region of our gravitationally bound system.
Unfortunately, both Voyagers will never reach the ice edge in a working condition, as their onboard generators continually continue to lose power. At its current speed, NASA experts predict that it will take Voyager 1 three centuries to reach the Oort cloud. It will take another 30,000 years to get to the other side of the cloud.
Engineers predict that Voyager 1 will have at least one working instrument by 2025 and could continue to talk into NASA’s Deep Space Network until 2036. It all depends on how much energy the probe has left by then.
Voyager 1 has shown signs of aging over the past few years. In addition to this most recent event, in 2022 a faulty computer on board began corrupting outgoing messages. The problem was eventually fixed, but it took a few days. Even traveling at the speed of light, radio messages from the probe take approximately 22.5 hours to return to Earth.
A NASA team is now working to maintain Voyager 1’s digital tape recorder. This memory system records just 48 seconds of high-speed data three times a week from the plasma wave instrument on board.
This means that when Voyager 1 loses its ability to communicate properly, all other information is lost.
Who knows what we missed in the last six months?
